Many (most) messages are about a lack of "Authoritative decision" in the haskell community. Concerning both libraries and the language (as GHC is mainly equivalent to Haskell). Everybody like to have the choice, but for haskell people seems lost. Too much time is taken to choose a library (or framework). The idea to put a rating system on hackage seem a very nice idea to limit this mess feeling.

Without denying the ability to write different libraries, it will also help people chose one.

Another subject was the fact that haskell is mainly ghc. And therefore the language seems not robust enough as any change in ghc is a change in haskell. One solution might be to have a "haskell language specification". It may be based on ghc but which will ensure backward compatibility.

On the other hand, I don't know what to do for people who find haskell to be "too difficult". I recently read an article saying in substance, that "learning haskell is hard and this is why you should learn it". Haskell introduces new notions which are hard to learn but essentially good for your programming skills like "pointers" in C.

I think the main problem for me (and what a lot of people have highlighted) is the lack of 'use case' documentation for libraries. Someone put it succinctly when they said something along the lines of "Haskell libraries are just reference documents with type signatures, whereas Ruby libraries tend to document use-case examples but neglect the reference documentation"

Haskell needs a bit of both to make it helpful for people to use libraries. When I try to evaluate a library I seem to spend a while searching for tutorials or trying to mess about in GHCI trying to get something working.

It would be nice to have some examples like "this is how you would use this to do A/B/C" etc

I think I remember one of the ideas for the next Hackage was to have a wiki associated with each package? This would be a great way to allow people to contribute tutorials and examples for a package in a place where they can be found easily.

"The proportion that use Haskell for web development rose from 23% to 32%, most likely because we now have two quality web frameworks: Snap and Yesod."

Two additional quality web frameworks -- the way it is phrased makes it seem like Happstack is not a quality web framework! It has its quirks and history, but is battle-tested, well supported, has been used in many places, and is under active development. I know the new kids on the block are shiny and also very good, but let's not forget some of the veterans :-)

The results of last year's report was typically used informally in discussions between me and other people working on Haskell infrastructure. My hope is that the results will convince people to e.g. improve the documentation of their libraries, etc.

As for Hackage, Duncan Coutts is the main contact person. He should be able to give a status update and point you to other people who are hacking on the project. If you have some spare cycles I'm sure he has plenty of things that you could spend them on.

It would be unspeakably awesome if you actually did write that in-depth guide to writing/profiling production Haskell code. I've had a few issues lately where a project relatively far along hit a leak of one kind or another, and the learning curve is steep!